Heidelberg physicists make new predictions about the collision of heavy ions at very high relativistic energies
When two heavy ions collide at very high relativistic energies, they penetrate one another, during which they become excited and are slowed down. This "stopping" process can be generated experimentally, as demonstrated on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Europe’s CERN research centre in Geneva (Switzerland). So far, however, the stopping process cannot be directly observed at the LHC. An international team led by Georg Wolschin, a physicist at Heidelberg University, recently calculated how the stopping process might look during collisions at very high energies in the LHC. ...
